Archery bows, crossbows, firearms, and similar devices are often equipped with a sight used to aid the shooter's aim. With respect to archery bows, one or more sight pins are typically provided to align the archery bow to a target at a given distance. The pins provide a reference point from which the shooter may gauge the path of a projectile when it is launched or fired. Archery bows in particular often use archery sights equipped with a pin guard that extends around relatively fragile sight pins in order to protect them from being damaged. A pin guard may also be used in a sight as an adjustment point for manually calibrating the alignment of the pin and/or peep sight of the bow in order to ensure accuracy while shooting.
Use of the sight pin and pin guard becomes difficult, however, in low light conditions, such as at dawn, dusk, or night time or while the shooter is positioned in a shaded or dark area such as inside a blind or surrounded by foliage. Thus, highly accurate shots may be difficult to make in low light conditions because of the difficulty of seeing the pin and the pin guard.
To help alleviate this problem, some conventional pin guards may feature a reflective tape, ultraviolet (UV) reactant material, or glow-in-the-dark markings to improve visibility of the ring around the sight pin in low light conditions. However, their effectiveness diminishes in common scenarios. The luminosity of a UV charge or glow-in-the-dark material depletes or degrades over time, such as while a hunter waiting in a natural or man-made blind, or due to the age of the glow material used. For its part, reflective tape needs a nearby artificial light source to be effective, which not practical to use in a blind and or when the hunter is trying to conceal his or her location out of a blind.
Some manufacturers have produced equipment with one or more conventional light sources positioned in the circumference of the pin guard that cast light on the pin to improve its low light visibility. The conventional light sources are usually incandescent and powered by a battery. In such devices, however, the light source is oriented to provide lighting solely to the sight pin(s), and thus the pin guard ring is not illuminated. Thus, the shooter is not given a reference point for the shooter against which to compare the sight pin within the sight guard. In addition, light output by these devices may also be undesirably visible from the target's side of the sight, revealing the shooter's position when the light is active.
Other sights have fiber optic strands wrapped around the pin guard ring that gather ambient light and then direct the light to illuminate a point on the sight pin or a portion of the pin guard, but these apparatuses require ambient light that is not readily available in a blind or in other dark areas where illumination is most important.
Accordingly, there is a need for improvements to lighted sight guards and sight pins that allow the shooter to accurately line up a shot in low light conditions.